As Dragons Go
by Tiamat's Child
Summary: Alchemy, under the table diplomacy, and espionage - all the usual, but with dragons. Spoilers through Chapter 90 of the manga.


**Title:** As Dragons Go  
**Author:** Tiamat's Child  
**Rating:** K  
**Fandom:** Fullmetal Alchemist  
**Character/s:** Ran Fan, Ling, ensemble  
**Disclaimer:** Not mine!  
Warnings: None.  
**Summary:** Alchemy, under the table diplomacy, and espionage - all the usual, but with dragons.  
**Notes:** Spoilers through Chapter 90 of the manga. No, I have no particular excuse.

As Dragons Go

Ran Fan looked down her nose at Ed. There was a lot of nose to look down, but Ed looked right back up it at her. "I made you a new one," he said, "it's perfectly fine."

Ran Fan's tail twitched. "It is not perfectly fine," she told him, "it is vulgar."

Ed tensed, but before he could say anything unwise, Ling cut in. "Look, Ran Fan! Al worked off my sketch!"

Ran Fan's ruff, which had been bristling and surprisingly fluffy, considering that it was thin skin and cartilage spines, softened a little. "Here," Al said, and held the medallion out to her.

She nosed at it. "But it is not the one you had made for me," she said to Ling, "it doesn't make it - "

"Be nice," Ling said, and stepped forward to take it from Al. "Here, let me put it on you."

"Very well," she said, still sounding disgruntled, but her ruff came down and she bent down her long neck for Ling to fasten the chain. "Thank you for the effort," she said to Al, slightly muffled by the angle.

"What about my effort?" Ed muttered, but Al gave him one of his strangely expressive expressionless looks, and he subsided.

* * *

Ran Fan snorted and lifted her long head haughtily. "You're just a bean," she told Ed.

Ed bounced on his heels. "Who're you calling a bean?" he demanded, "you're nothing but a speck, as dragons go!"

* * *

"There's a dragon out back," Falman said, stepping away from the window and letting the curtain fall. "And not a dragon I know. We may have trouble."

"A dragon?" Ling leapt over the kitchen counter, vaulting across the gas burners on the stove in a way that made Falman wince.

"Watch out for the tea kettle!" he said, but Ling was already at the window, flinging open the sash, and down below in the neglected, sandy yard the dragon was rearing up to meet him.

"It's Ran Fan!" Ling called over his shoulder. "Don't worry, she's my comrade. I called her."

And then Ling was down in the yard and the dragon was twining about him like an improbably serpentine cat, nuzzling him and apologizing for having missed where he had gone, her whole attitude at once submissive and extremely possessive. Falman rubbed a circle around his temple. He'd never seen a dragon so long for her weight before. Not that she was large. Breda made a good two dozen of her, even if you disregarded the fact that Breda was rather fonder of applesauce rolls and long games of chess and go in the sun than was, strictly speaking, good for him.

"Ah," said Barry, at his shoulder. Falman started and tried to jerk sideways away from him. "Young love. Makes you nostalgic, don't it?"

"She's his dragon," Falman said.

"Believe I said that," Barry said, and Falman remembered that he wasn't talking to Barry any more than absolutely necessary.

* * *

"I can't feed your dragon forever!" Ed protested to Ling. "Even with my research budget, they don't pay me that much!"

* * *

After he'd determined that he was not, in fact, dying from heart failure, Ed opened his eyes, hand still on his chest, and found himself meeting one great, dark, draconic optic. "Someone as big as you should not be able to be a sneak thief," he told Ran Fan, "and back off, haven't you ever heard of socially polite distances?"

Ran Fan huffed, which was rather more disconcerting when she did it so closely to you that your heavy wool coat moved with her breath. "I was not thieving," she said, "I was engaged in reconnaissance. Which is altogether a better pursuit for a soldier, even if some authorities quibble as to how honorable it is. You really have no nerve."

"I have plenty of nerve!" Ed snapped, "I am very well supplied with nerve. I have miles worth. But why are you reconnoitering me?"

"Clearly I am not," she said. "I am back now. You are very unreasonable."

* * *

Knox froze, and turned to glare at Roy. "When you said, 'I need you to tend a young woman,' I assumed you meant a human woman."

Roy flashed a grin at him. "Oh, but she's more charming than most human women."

"I have no doubt," Knox said sardonically, already propping his bag open on the table, "but I've never made a study of dragons, and I haven't got enough bandages."

"We can take care of the second," Roy said, "as to the first... Well, I - "

"Please, doctor," Ling interrupted, "do your best for her, regardless. She is - She is my comrade, and she will not understand if I cannot help her."

Knox hurrumphed, and pulled a bottle of surgical alcohol from his bag. "I didn't say I wouldn't do my best. She's a patient, I'll damn well do my best. Get out, kid, you're filthy, we'll never get this place sterile."

* * *

"She is merely jealous," Ran Fan explained to Knox, coiled neatly in his potting shed, "because she has only a stunted panda and I am more useful and also much nicer."

* * *

Greed laughed with delight, without sound, only the impulse echoing in Ling's body, vast waves of amused admiration. "She's your girl?" he asked, and laughed again. "You sneaky son of a bitch!"

Ling grinned. "Well," he said to Greed, in the same fashion, "you didn't ever ask."

* * *

"Mmmm," said Hohenheim, "and I will go with Miss Ran Fan, because I am an old, retiring scholar, and would rather pass the day with a charming young lady with a fine set of claws."

Ran Fan blinked slowly.

"That is all right with you, my dear?" Hohenheim asked.

"Sir," Ran Fan said, arching her neck in a polite bow and flowing into the narrow passage so that she both followed and preceded him.

They walked in silence for a time, Hohenheim with an expression of perpetual mild surprise, Ran Fan with her tail twitching, no matter how hard she tried to quell it.

"You need to find that Xingese prince, don't you?" Hohenheim said, conversationally, a great warm sympathy in his voice. Ran Fan's tail froze. "It will be all right from here," he said, "go on. You can go."

She stiffened, ruff fluffing upward, the sinuous line of her back straightening in sudden distress. "Oh!" she said, "oh, no! No, I - "

"It's all right," he said, interrupting her as few people who had not known her from her egg ever interrupted her, steady and confident and kind, sure of her self control. She subsided. "Don't worry about us. We'll do very well. He is your chosen companion, isn't he?"

Ran Fan stayed unsustainably stiff and level for what seemed an age but was really no great time at all. An exhalation, an inspiration, an exhalation again and she moved, leaping upward and twisting, sliding herself into a smaller access tunnel, a space nearly too small for her. She doubled about with difficulty to look down at Hohenheim looking up at her, a tall man with immense gentleness in his golden eyes. There was so much of him, he felt more like a great city on a market day than a single person. "Thank you," she said, very softly, feeling very young and uncommonly small, "thank you very much."

And then she ran, forward and onward, her wings folded close against her so they would not catch, and hurt, and hold her back.

Ling was her chosen companion. Going to him was better than going home.


End file.
